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The bandages come off slow.
Wemmbu sits on the edge of the bed, hunched, fingers working the stained linen around his ribs. The cloth peels away in clumps, tacky with dark, dried blood, pulling at skins he doesn’t bother to flinch for. He watches the unraveling in silence, stained sashes flailing onto the bed while some greets the floor, all without a sound.
The cycle continues in quiet tugs, strip after strip, until there’s nothing left but the skin beneath. Scarred, raw, a harsh galley that whispers into his ears and rings him with a reminder that he hasn’t vanished into smoke; at least not yet.
He doesn’t wear a shirt. There’s no need to, it will only irritate the already-sensitive, rosette-blooming skin he had just exposed further—but that’s only part of it, because in truth, he just wants to see the view. The canvas he has lodged onto himself, with shaken hands and ragged blades, with deflects and counters that he knows are risky but doesn’t find it in him to brake himself from bracing.
The air is cool against his chest, and he almost welcomes it. The stings sink their teeth in him where skin meets air, but he doesn’t cower away. They—the sting, the pain—were never a stranger, they are a constant friend if anything. One he’s familiar with way before Egg is here with him, one he’s acquainted with way before everything went to shit, and it would be discourteous of him if he goes on without greeting them for too long.
They are the one thing that keeps him honest, they are the reason he still bothers to patch himself up again and again, over and over, because he knows they will grace him once more, sooner or later—and they want his dermis to be freshened and healed for when reunion is inevitable.
There’s a few leftover bandage scraps around him when he finished thinking, too shy to meet the mattress and floor, curling in his hand dependently like dead snakes. Quite unfortunate for them, though, because Wemmbu has already learned his lesson from a while back: the dead can’t talk back, can’t reciprocate, and he doesn’t have any more space in his heart. Too thinly veiled, cut out of straws and twigs, to deal with long-gones. So, wordlessly, he tips his hand over and introduces them to the wooden flat below.
His chest catches the lamplight when he lets bandages go, each scar reflecting dull lavender under the warm glint, showing maps of battles that no one else will remember in detail but him, and his company, because they are always covered up with extravagant ruffles and fabrics outside of their base, hidden beneath layers of laughter and mockery that he frisks into more skillfully each day.
Some marks are faint; whereas others rise like stubborn ridges, though he caresses through them all the same, only pausing to deliberately run a thumb over one particularly recent, yet large mark along his collarbone. The skin feels foreign under his touch, too new, too unfamiliar with the fleshy addition when it was bare just moments before. It leaves a sensation that makes him sick when his fingertips roam over the cut, as though he’s touching anyone's body but his own.
Maybe because it really isn't his body anymore when he tainted it with blood of both him and the deceased all those kills ago. Maybe his body had long stopped being his when he forgets if the red on his hands are from his own visceral torn or from the bleeding bodies beneath his feet.
Behind him, Egg shifts into the bed, tossing a pillow into place, messy and loud, like he's trying to drag Wemmbu out of his brooding; maybe he was.
“You’re gonna end up with more scars than skin if you keep touching them like that,” Egg complains as he settles down awkwardly—positioned in a mix of being hoisted up by the elbow and tipping over with that same elbow. His voice is half complaint, half tease, like most things out of his mouth.
Wemmbu takes a breath, but doesn’t answer right away. He continues to wander as if the threat isn't there. From the collar to the hip, he travels, then stops and presses a palm over the side of his torso without any better judgement, letting the tip of his fingers smear across the half-healed gash. The ache burns into his hand like a brand, sharp enough to make his teeth clench but still, he doesn't know why he didn't pull away. For a moment, he just holds it there, savoring the way it hurts like he was repenting for putting the cicatrices there to begin with.
He hears Egg sigh before the dip of the mattress lets him know Egg's coming closer. Probably to tell him off—and he's right when a warmth encloses itself around his bare skin.
“Stop touching them, dude.” Egg chastises in a scold, huffing. He props a chin on his hand to push himself forward, the other reaching out to grab onto Wemmbu’s wrist and dragging it away. “What, are you planning to carve a whole gallery onto yourself?”
“Bro, maybe I like the view.” He gives a dry laugh and flexes his arm in Egg’s grasp just to be difficult, watching the scars stretch, bend, then hold. “Better art than whatever you hang on your walls.”
Egg snorts, but he doesn’t let go. What he does merit though, is letting Wemmbu’s jab hang for a necessary second, then fires back lazily. “That art of yours only exists because you keep forgetting you are mortal.” He pauses, registering the rest of the insult. “And that creeper painting is a masterpiece, dude. You just don’t get him like I do.”
“Yeah, I just don’t get your tastes in general,” Wemmbu wriggles out of Egg’s grip, the other lets go with a sigh and a look that sprouts too much like a warning more than Wemmbu’d like, but he complies anyway and allows his hand to drop away from his chest.
He manages a half laugh. “They’ve been bad," a pause, then he adds. "Even worse lately.”
Egg gives an eye roll, muttering something like alright bro under his breath before giving him a dismissive wave. Wemmbu just turns away, gleaming.
Eventually, Wemmbu decides he has his fill of holding onto smudged linens and finally begins to scrape all the scraps down from the mattress to join their siblings on the floor, giving them a mean kick into the corner afterwards.
They land in a heap, discarded like a molt. And for a second he imagines what it would be like to strip the rest of himself just as easily as those torn dressings—to crawl out of past grudges that still weighs on his mind with ease, to slip out of those stupid devotions he still hold to those who aren’t even here anymore. Then maybe he can leave that husk on the floor, and build one anew.
Wemmbu holds back a laugh at his imagination, as vivid as it is he knows better than to believe that’s possible. After all, scars only fade, not shed.
Every mark tells a story, and as much as he hates going back onto them, he still remembers them all. Because that’s what those marks do. They come and leave permanence, even when everything else dissolves.
If there's one thing about that permanence that he knows, is that it stains and when it does, it stains bad, especially with the way people perceive one another. It sucks, but it is what it is, has long since resigned into that realization when he passes by people after people, hearing the echoes of what they consider him as.
A weapon, a threat. Something sharp to be pointed in the right direction. He never denied it—hell, he leaned into it even. It's easier becoming the monster people expect than wasting energy pretending he’s softer than he is. Violence is currency, thorns are the way of life, and in this server, it’s the only language people listen to when they talk about justice.
But that permanence, that many scars and spikes he carries don’t only scream of violence. They whisper of hesitation. Of moments where he almost didn’t strike, of times he stayed his hand and lingered back when Mane’s voice told him not to because he feels, and Mane doesn’t share that. Empathy is a wound too, stemming from the same fucked up constancy—they cut into him whenever he tries to forget them, tears into him like an unwanted lesson that he can't deny. Then— then, the sentimentality comes, and when it slashes, it leaves the deepest gash of all.
It would be easy, too easy, to just stop thinking about whatever that is, to just be the caricature Mane told him to be. The mace wielder. The ruthless one. The strongest. He knows how to wear that title now; it fits better every day. Mane would’ve been proud, maybe.
Because this is what people see nowadays. Not the Wemmbu Mane knows before he left—the Wemmbu who fumbles with landing a stunt slam, the Wemmbu who only hits stationary, lucky mace shots. Today, they see this—this Wemmbu that isn’t any of that. They see someone carved from chaos, meant to swing until something shatters. And he wears it, weaves into the role like the bandage he’s just stripped off. Not natural, not chosen, but pressed onto him until it fuses with the skin.
But even with the new parts, new films, that he tries so hard to implement so Mane can subsequently claw the sentimentality out of him, Wemmbu never quite let go of his core. The little mementos from the escape room—armors with despicable trims that he stores in a shulker, unwilling to give up, that shows more than he’d like to acknowledge.
The memories of Zam, even after betrayal, and now amends. The grudges he can’t drop, but also the bonds he can’t erase. He still feels them, twisted as they are. He can’t chop down his empathy no matter how much they betray Mane’s teachings.
He hates that empathy stings. But he clings onto them anyway, the same way he clings to the throb of his wounds. Because no matter how hard he tries to scrub at them, with a loofah containing new layers of himself, they don’t go, don’t exfoliate—they remind him he's still here in the most insufferable way possible in comparison to pain.
Wemmbu supposes it's fair; he can’t erase a part of himself that he didn’t build because he was born with them. He can't rip them off like armor because they’re not plastered on, as much as he wanted to.
And that annoyingly stay as a reminder. Because every time he thinks he’s embraced that new self, times where he mocked the weak, sneered at their fumbling hands and trembling armor, all because it was easier to be above them than beside them. Just for him to see a new side of them later, bonds with them unknowingly, that he realizes he never quite got rid of his humanity, that he never truly finished that part of his training with Mane.
Tap.
Egg breaks the silence again with a pat on his shoulders, this time he’s sitting cross-legged, and the pillow from earlier is in his lap instead of being by the headrest. “Stop thinking too much, it’s loud.”
Wemmbu hums and finally looks at him. Egg doesn’t flinch under the stare. He never does. That’s what makes him dangerous—more dangerous than people think. His jokes and his fishing hobby make him look harmless, but he’s walked away from burning empires with soot on his hands. He’s sent out raids that left villages empty. He always laughed with Wemmbu whenever the smoke cleared.
The masses like to paint Egg as the calm one, the clean one. A pedestal. They could fool anyone, really they could, anybody but Wemmbu, though; because unlike them, he knows better, knows the version that’s not coated in rose-tinted glasses, knows the one that likes to instigate as much as he likes peacekeeping. He’s seen the dirt under Egg’s fingernails because he’s the one that dug into it with him.
Wemmbu shrugs. "You always get philosophical with your lore books, let me have this, bro.” He replies with a long stretch, scooting further into the bed instead of tethering by the edge after. Egg inches over to give him space, but not before giving him a knock onto his shoulders—the clean side—and Wemmbu elbows him back just as easily.
They fall into rhythm, but this one doesn't have a tempo, nor a set rhythm. And it doesn't need one, Wemmbu thinks, and he'd like to believe Egg has the same idea too—in how the quiet drags by and how they both let it stay, how they let themselves relish in this temporary serenity. It can be their piacere.
But, a freestyle is meant to break at one point or another because Wemmbu doesn't sit still for long. So of course, he speaks up first, eventually, and neither of them bother to grieve the lost peace when words start to crank through. They just simply settle back into the flow of conversation like the silence never stretched through them to begin with.
There's no need to mourn when the piece is to be played at their own discretion—where both Egg and Wemmbu share the same conductor role of this melody they know all too well.
With a start, Wemmbu hums quietly. “People are wrong about you, y’know? Not the fighting part, they’re right to assume you suck.” He snickers when Egg slams the pillow onto him afterwards, making his next words all jumbled with a wheezed breath. “Let- let me finish,” he coughs out.
Egg pulls back, reluctantly, and Wemmbu takes the quiet as his own again to continue. “They think you’re spotless.”
The presence next to him shrugs and fixes the pillow back where it belongs. “They’re wrong about a lot of things, dude.” Then, Wemmbu hears a huff—low and short, followed by a soft plop of the feathered bag down the sheets—“What are you suggesting? Do you want me to write a resume of war crimes?”
“You could.” Wemmbu’s tone lightens with amusement. “You’re no saint. You’ve done shit.”
He earns a resigned smile back in return before Egg shifts to lay down, mumbling sarcastically in response with a bunch of faded maybe’s. Wemmbu grins, he will have to see for himself if Egg will actually readjust the author’s note in his lore book later, it would be funny if he did—with some obscure writing like: the author of this record is also potentially guilty of a few crimes. Maybe.
That would be hilarious, and would probably send whoever picks up the remnants of that book later into a historic coma, too. Wemmbu's all for sending people into comas, more medically if anything, but, that counts.
Yeah, okay, he will do that. Later. Wemmbu quietly reminds himself of that oath somewhere in his head before reaching over to lightly shake the lantern by their bedside to dimness. He gives one last sigh and lies down on the bed, too, with admittedly, some struggles due to the rawness of the scars—they ache and flare a little, but he’ll live, he always does.
The thoughts come back, though, inevitably.
When Wemmbu's head hits the pillow, he can't help but wonder once more, not for the first time, if Mane was right. If mercy makes him weak, if sentimentality is just a chain dragging him under. If he's really alive—living in Mane's footsteps like he wanted to when he keeps biting his tongue when he should be bearing his teeth. (And in a sense, Wemmbu's not wrong, emotion is a weakness when wielded like a blade, Mane warns him of that all the time.)
Again, he tried—he really did—to burn them all away like Mane had advised, to step cleanly into the role of a cold-blooded weapon. And for a while, it worked. Until he caught himself keeping tokens, hesitating at the edge of mercy, feeling too much when he should feel nothing.
But, does that really matter, though? He’s come this far with those flaws, he can bear them for a little longer just like he always did—if he cannot shovel them under sand and gravel, if he cannot bury them like underwater chests. Then he will just, learn to live with them, maybe - he can take them with him like the keepsakes he burdened in his ender chest, hold them somewhere secure like the souvenirs he hid in his shulker boxes because well, they are him as much as he is them, after all.
The lamp flickers beside him, and as the fire twitches its last gulf before it goes out, shining one last orange glimpse on his hair, Wemmbu decides that, yeah, that will do.
He’ll play the role tomorrow. He’ll sneer, he’ll taunt, he’ll smash skulls until the world remembers his name. He’ll be the mace wielder, the weapon, the strongest player—because that’s what they want, and he’s too tired to invent another version of himself for the spotlight. But tonight, in the dim quiet of the base, in the way the moon takes another step deeper into the sky, that conclusion suffices his qualms.
So, Wemmbu closes his eyes, and when he eventually slips to sleep minutes later, it is light, and final.
With pain, with scars, with the steady ghosts of Egg breathing next to him, with the revelation, and with everything in between them—the absolution to amend his weakness dwindles, (enough to acceptance).
Maybe that’s enough.